BeReal was created in 2020 by French entrepreneur Alexis Barreyat. While the app doesn't seem to use new technology, it does do something refreshing, it eliminates a lot of the features we've come to expect from social media photo-sharing apps, such as filters and editing. While Instagram and Facebook are built on the idea of building personal brands to help build large followings, BeReal is the opposite which keeps social media as authentic as possible by preventing branding and audience building. BeReal has been downloaded more than 5 million times worldwide, with 3.2 million of those downloads coming in the first quarter of 2022. As of Q1 2022, BeReal ranked fourth in downloads in the U.S., U.K. and France, behind Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest.

Here's how it works as follows. At different times each day, users receive push notifications from the app. They have just 2 minutes to open BeReal and take a picture of what they're doing. The app activates both the front and rear cameras on the user's phone, so in effect the user takes two photos that are uploaded at the same time, and others can see what the user looks like and where he or she is located.

The unique part of BeReal is that no filters or beauty effects are enabled when the user takes a photo. During the 2-minute shooting time, while users can delete unsatisfactory photos and retake them, the time does limit the number of actions they can take, but other people can see if you've retaken the photo, and how many times! At the same time, users can't see their friends' BeReal until they post their own which is probably the most significant difference between BeReal and apps like Instagram. In addition, when we want to interact with posters on other platforms, we usually leave emojis, but on BeReal users need to take a photo of themselves making the appropriate emoji to reply to a post.